Stand Up For Yourself, Hillary Clinton

December 18, 1992|By Robert Reno, Newsday

If Hillary Clinton is half the woman they say she is, she'll reassume her maiden name, register as an agent for the government of Romania, accept positions on the boards of directors of several major defense contractors and announce she's setting up a law practice specializing in representing clients before the regulatory agencies in Washington.

And then she'll say that if anybody doesn't like it they can lump it. There's simply no other way she can reclaim herself.

When asked last week what his wife's role would be, the president-elect said: ''I am not prepared to define her role in the White House yet. But I will before long.''

The implication is clear: Mrs. Clinton is not a human being, but a political chattel, a hunk of meat, waiting to be ''defined,'' perhaps by a committee of the transition team which will take polls and weigh the relative merits of cookie baking and presiding over teas vs. an active role and the danger that she'll be perceived as pushy, bossy and clever. Even now, along with resumes of job applicants, this group may be poring over such minutiae as whether the headband comes back or stays in the drawer.

The demeaning process of artificially ''defining'' this grown woman is the inevitable result of the early decision by Clinton campaign strategists - perhaps even by Hillary herself - to be hypersensitive to all the media twaddle and Republican innuendoes about her influence and involvement. The underlying implication always has been that if she could discuss policy intelligently she must be a malign, power mad, conniving battleaxe.

It boiled down, basically, to the fatuous issue of whether Mrs. Clinton had a brain. Instead of merely announcing that she did, have a brain that is - and what of it? - they overtly schemed to create a softer, more unfocused, unprovocative, vague, a more wifely, not to say simpering and insipid, version of this accomplished, educated woman, prattling away with Katie Couric on morning TV.

And so to this day, The New York Times is still printing tedious articles full of anonymous sources chattering, on the one hand, that Mrs. Clinton will exert her influence through ''pillow talk'' and, on the other, that ''her advisers said that if Mrs. Clinton takes too much time before staking her ground on issues like children her detractors will portray her as pulling Mr. Clinton's strings on other issues.'' Or they say how her advisers are plotting to ''defuse questions that she'll meddle in defense and issues she is not knowledgeable about.''

Personally, I don't see why Mrs. Clinton has to be either a pillow-talking insider or an out-front cat's paw for her husband's policies. If she's so smart I would be more impressed if she announced she would meddle in defense, had nothing to do with naming Lloyd Bentsen and a couple of Wall Street tycoons to the top economic jobs, that she despises the death penalty, finds Al Gore a crashing bore and will make Clinton sleep on the sofa until he fully funds Head Start.